Musings on Photography

In this post I mentioned that when I’m tempted to think that low resolution means that good photos aren’t possible, I’m reminded of the work that Chris Crandall has done in the Palouse.

Well, I got it almost right. I know Chris, and his wife, Chris. And it’s his wife’s name that’s Chris Crandall. The photographer Chris is actually Chris Harris. I get their names mixed up constantly; this isn’t the first time I’ve committed this particular error.

Anyway, Chris Harris is a pinhole photographer. When I first met Chris (our kids attended the same school) years ago, he was just starting the Palouse work. I saw it then, and it didn’t light my fire (perhaps because I was in my large format B&W high resolution everything must be crisply in focus phase), but when I saw the big prints he had up at what was the first show of the work, I was stunned. Ever since then, I’ve been finding that each time I look at it, I like it more and more.

You can see quite a lot of Chris’s work at his website at http://chrisharrisphoto.com/galleries.html and also at various gallery sites (e.g. the Lisa Harris Gallery) which you can find using Google (assuming you get the name right).

I finally got my hands on a copy of this book, which is the source for the quotation in this post. As I expected, I found the essay the quoted text came from to be what I’ve come to expect from John Szarkowski. Szarkowski always leaves me feeling muddled and confused, not least because (although he himself was a photographer) he always seems muddled and confused about how the actual process of photography works for so very many photographers. It always seems to me like Szarkowski is some sort of forensic anthropologist who stumbled across a tribe of exotic, alien people and has never quite figured out what their culture is about. Oh, he has lots of breathless prose that articulates arcane theories about it all, but I never get the impression that he actually believes them himself. Everyone else seems to think that the sun shines out his ass (or did), so I guess maybe it’s just me.

In contrast, I found the essay that starts the book (written by Britt Salvesen) to be much more up my alley. The essay starts

Harry Callahan is an icon in American photography. Self-taught, driven, taciturn by nature but endlessly inventive in his art, Callahan rose from inauspicious beginnings to become a central figure in mid-twentieth-century modernism and one the most influential teachers of his generation. He discovered photography in 1938 at the age of twenty-six; within five years he had already mastered the techniques, themes, and subjects he would explore over a career of some six decades. In a field dominated by eccentrics, bohemians, pedants, and high priests, Callahan epitomized the regular guy, the reticent Midwesterner quick to deflate any critic’s mystification of his creative process. And yet he pursued his chosen medium with complete dedication and faith, integrating his life and art in a highly disciplined but deeply intuitive manner.

One passage that particularly caught my attention was this:

Arthur Siegel, an early mentor of Callahan’s, reflected: “I was a damn good photographer, but I get bored easily with an idea, whereas to be, you know, a great artist like Harry, [you have to] kick it to death. You know, you keep doing it over and over and over again, and I never did that.

It isn’t so much that I agree that in order to be a great artist you have to pound things into the ground and just exhaust them. It was more that apparently this is what Callahan did - he kept returning to the same ideas, the same material, and kept finding them a well that never ran dry.

Callahan’s words on this:

I photograph continuously, often without a good idea or strong feelings. During this time the photos are nearly all poor but I believe they develop my seeing and help later on in other photos. I do believe strongly in photography and hope by following it intuitively that when the photographs are looked at they will touch the spirit in people.

The essay goes on and on. To be honest, I haven’t read the whole thing, because I get started, and before I’ve turned the page I’ve hit another idea that has my distractable mind whizzing off on another tangent. That’s not bad, it’s good.

And I really like Callahan’s photos, at least most of the ones in this book. More books on order from the library. And although I resist buying books (I prefer to let the library buy them, lend them to me when I want them, and store them for me when I don’t), I suspect I’m going to break down and get a copy of this one.

Tracy Helgeson, an artist who from my pedestrian position appears to be deservedly fixed in the artistic celestial firmament, wrote in this entry in her blog;

In the interview, I prattled on about how going to art school was really valuable to me and how making many sacrifices, including time and income would probably be necessary, blah blah blah. While those things are true, what I really should have said was this:

Put your heart into your work. Period. Many other things are important, like an education, observation, talent, imagination and discipline, but learning how to be honest in my work has brought me many rewards. Not financial (I would have totally smirked here) although that is good, of course, but the utter joy of expressing myself and connecting with others through that expression. And the heart and the honesty is what makes that possible.

I love Helgeson’s blog.  I suspect we all subscribe to some degree to a romanticized notion of the artistic life, but she does a wonderful job of painting a different, more realistic view by just telling us about how she fits making art, preparing for shows, and the other tasks that face artists into a life that seems full to overflowing with home life, including kids, spouse, chickens and the rest of a fully lived, balanced life.

I was deeply saddened last month to note the death of Ruth Bernhard.  The world is a better place for having had Ruth in it, and a poorer place now that she’s gone.

 I had the extraordinary good fortune to take a workshop taught by Ruth at the Coupeville Arts Center, just about a decade ago.  Ruth was then 91 or 92, and took great care to not overextend, but even then her intense love of life, photography, and art and her eagerness to share with students was incredible.  Ruth was far and away the oldest person in the room, but she ran all of us ragged.

Ruth’s direct honesty was just what I needed, just when I needed it.  We were all instructed to bring a set of prints for review, and on a whim, I picked one image that I didn’t feel was all that strong in my box.  When Ruth went through my portfolio,  she went through my prints, making a very honest but pointed appraisal.  When she got to that one print, she looked at it, and looked at it, and then looked at me for a few seconds.  Then she looked back at the print, looked at me, and said “This one really doesn’t belong with these others, does it?  It’s not as good.  But then, I can see you already knew that!”, with one of her grins.

Ruth was an impressive, insightful artist.  She leaves behind a life’s work of incredible photography ranging from her famous nudes to luminous photographs of quotidian scenes (The title of one of her books is “The Gift of the Commonplace”).  I don’t want to discount the importance of her artistic legacy, but one of her greatest gifts to those who had the good fortune to have met her is this: she was an incredible example of a vibrantly alive person who was determined to live life her own way, with incredible force of personal will, ever receptive to the opportunities she saw around every corner.

In an recent interview, the playwright John Patrick Shanley said “I’m very aware that debate has become the form of the communication, like on Crossfire. There is no room or value placed on doubt, which is one of the hallmarks of a wise man. It’s getting harder and harder in this society to find a place for spacious, true intellectual exchange. It’s all becoming about who won the argument, which is just moronic.”

Shanley’s play Doubt won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the Drama Desk award, and a Tony Award for Best Play. It’s one of the best plays I’ve seen, ever. And trust me - I’ve seen a hell of a lot of plays. Shanley deserves every accolade he’s gotten for Doubt, and I think that we ignore his warning at great social peril.

It would be nice to think that the world of Art would be just the sort of place Shanley wishes would be easier to find in our society - a place where it’s not all about winning the argument. Artists, in general, seem to pride themselves on their openmindedness, on their tolerant viewpoints and respect for diversity.

Sadly, it seems to me that the Art world isn’t really much different from the rest of society, and it also seems to me that artists in general are, if anything, more polarized and certain in their convictions than the rest of the population.

Why else would someone comment “I’d love to be able to afford to NOT sell to people with socially conservative “values”? Is that really the attitude we want - we’re not even willing to sell our art to someone just because we disagree with their politics? We look forward to a day when we can afford to turn someone’s business just because he disagrees with us?

Wake up. Tolerance is pretty shallow when you insist that someone hide their political views from you in order to do business with you. Diversity is a sham when it means ‘people who look different but all think the way I do’.